Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #694, 4/20/14

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #694, 4/20/14

This Easter/Passover Week: Time for Christians and Jews To Assert Indigenous Status in What’s Not “the Arab Middle East”

Effectively fighting anti-Israel media bias runs deeper than writing op-eds and letters “to the editor” correcting misstatements of particular facts in particular news stories. It runs deeper than challenging the loaded lexicon in which Western media news stories on Israel are written. It’s about fighting the mindset, too prevalent in the West, that Muslims are more natively indigenous to the Middle East than are its Christians and Jews.

The mainstream media propagates this misperception, e.g., by pointedly contrasting “Jewish settlements” with “Palestinian villages … towns.” There’s a homeland of difference between “Jewish settlers” and “Palestinian residents.” This contrast has embedded itself in the mindsets of both grassroots people and America’s political leaders. (Anybody who thinks “settlements” is not pejorative can explain to me why the one time when the Inq used “Palestinian settlements” 3/14/02, two days later it “cleared the record” to “Palestinian towns and refugee camps.”)

In the face of Jews as diverse in viewpoint as Netanyahu and the Reform’s Rabbi Yoffie both explicitly insisting that over-the-1949-ceasefire-line Jewish Jerusalem neighborhoods are not “Jewish settlements,” Secretary Kerry this month, in his “poof – that was sort of the moment” of peace talks collapse, pointed to “700 settlement units were announced in Jerusalem.” I connect dots between Western media characterization of Israel as “created and founded in 1948” (while saying that Syria, Lebanon, India and Pakistan “won their independence” in that era, Pressing Israel, pp. 24-25), and the U.S. President telling the whole world from Cairo – “It is easy to point fingers – for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought by Israel’s founding.”

In an op-ed this week in The Wall Street Journal, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Ron Prosor, pointed to the treatment of the Middle East’s indigenous Christians as similar to that decades ago of the Middle East’s indigenous Jews:

At the turn of the 20th century, Christians made up 26% of the Middle East’s population. Today, that figure has dwindled to less than 10%. Intolerant and extremist governments are driving away the Christian communities that have lived in the Middle East since their faith was born.

He cited the manner in which this is done. Syria:

In the rubble of Syrian cities like Aleppo and Damascus, Christians who refused to convert to Islam have been kidnapped, shot and beheaded by Islamist opposition fighters. . . .

Syria’s Christian population has dropped from 30% in the 1920s to less than 10% today.

Egypt:

In Egypt, mobs of Muslim Brotherhood members burn Coptic Christian churches in the same way they once obliterated Jewish synagogues.

Iraq:

And in Iraq, terrorists deliberately target Christian worshippers. This past Christmas, 26 people were killed when a bomb ripped through a crowd of worshipers leaving a church in Baghdad’s southern Dora neighborhood. . . .

Over the past 10 years, nearly two-thirds of Iraq’s 1.5 million Christians have been driven from their homes. Many settled in Syria before once again becoming victims of unrelenting persecution.

Prosor contrasted Christians’ position in Israel, “the only country in the Middle East with a growing Christian population,” from 34,000 in 1948 to 140,000 today.

My fighting-anti-Israel-media-bias pitch this week – and if not this Easter/Passover week, when? – is that Christians and Jews have a common Mideast survival stake in asserting that they are no less indigenous to the Middle East, which is not an “Arab Middle East,” an “Islamic Middle East,” than its Muslim Arabs. Both Christians and Jews, as such, have continuously lived there, Jews for a millennium and a half, Christians for half a millennium, before Islam’s birth.

Glimmers of awareness of this are appearing. Last October, CAMERA reported on a remarkable, if perhaps unusual, conference of some of Middle East Christians in Israel. One participant, Lt. Shaadi Khalloul, spokesman for the Israeli Christian Recruitment Forum, an officer retired from the Israel Defense Forces Paratroopers Brigade, and a scholar of the Christian faith in the region, said:

The typical Christian student thinks that he belongs to the Arab people and the Islamic nation, instead of speaking to the people with whom he truly shares his roots — the Jewish people, whose origins are in the Land of Israel.

Khalloul countered: “The State of Israel is our heart. Israel is a holy state, a strong state, and its people, Jews and Christians alike, are united under one covenant.”

As reported in Israel Hayom, Rev. Gabriel Naddaf, a Greek Orthodox priest in Nazareth, addressed the gathering:

Naddaf spoke of the Christian roots, planted deep in this land since the dawn of Christianity. This is where Jesus Christ’s doctrine first emerged. The Christian faith, he said, came out of the Jewish faith and its biblical roots. As far as Naddaf is concerned, what happened in the seventh century was an Arab invasion from which the Christians also suffered. He added that he wasn’t very proud of the Christian crusades either, and distanced himself from them.

He surveyed the dire situation currently faced by Christians in Arab states, and said that the realization that Israel is the only country in the region that protects its Christian minority has prompted many Arabic-speaking Israeli Christians to develop a desire to contribute to the state of Israel.

“CAMERA could find no reporting on this conference in any mainstream media outlet.”

That this will mature into greater reality is perhaps optimistic, but let us cease sounding like dhimmis – mindlessly mouthing “the partitioning of Palestine between Palestinians and Jews,” as opposed to between Arabs and Jews; the “founding and creation of Israel,” as though artificially and out-of-the-blue; “Jewish settlers” in “the West Bank” and in historic Jerusalem (with its pre-Zionist 19th century-renewed Jewish majority) in mainstream-media contradistinction to “Palestinian residents”; etc., etc.

Perhaps, a rare Western media glimpse of the fate befalling other minorities, this time Muslim, in the Mideast will leave us with the understanding that the Arabs play hardball. Back on 3/15/03, then Inq-owner Knight-Ridder reported:

Tens of thousands of Kurds, Turkmen, and other minorities have been living in the northern [Kurdish controlled, “no-fly” zone] enclave since being expelled from the Kirkuk region by Hussein’s Baath Party in waves of ethnic cleansing. Thousands have been killed or have disappeared, their property given to Arabs from elsewhere in Iraq. The “Arabization” program is aimed at consolidating Baghdad’s grip on oil-rich areas dominated by minorities. . . .
New York-based Human Rights Watch charged in a report yesterday that the “Arabization’” campaign has continued unabated since the 1991 uprising. [emphasis added]

Best wishes to our greatly valued Christian readers for your commemoration of Easter.

Regards,
Jerry